Chapter Thirty-Six – Time Warped

"Have you come with me because you want to check out these shops and artisans, or because Shingen asked you to keep me out of trouble?" I sent a challenging look toward Yoshimoto as we approached a studio belonging to Tokuro, a wood artist who had been recommended to us. I'd been on the hunt for another burr puzzle, hoping to find something to distract Shingen into taking breaks from his work. Eventually, I asked Yoshimoto where he had found the first one, and he'd offered to help me search.

"Do you think I do everything Shingen asks of me?" Yoshimoto gestured for me to precede him into a home-studio that smelled pleasantly of sawdust and lacquer.

"Oh, I am well aware that you don't." It had been a point of complaint from Shingen during the tactical lessons. "I'm also well aware that you did not answer my question."

"You're sounding more and more like a spymaster. And possibly an interrogator." He bowed to Tokuro who responded with an even more reverent bow. Yoshimoto's reputation as a patron of arts preceded him. "To answer that question – I am, as you must know by now, always interested in art and antiques… but it may also be true that my cousin requested I accompany you."

Oooh, I was so going to have to have another talk with Shingen. "It's not like I haven't already spent the better part of a week looking for a puzzle on my own."

"That will be our secret." Yoshimoto turned to Tokuro, introduced me, then wandered off to examine some carved screens, while I explained to the artist what I was looking for.

Hopefully, he had some already in his shop. I could always commission one, but since I wanted a puzzle sooner rather than later, I was hoping to find one that was already completed.

Tokuro frowned for a moment as I tried to explain what burr puzzle looked like, then led me to a display of boxes with an inlay lid. "I do not have a puzzle of that sort, though the concept is intriguing. But will something like this serve instead?"

A box? It took me a moment before I realized these were puzzle boxes. It had been a long time since I had seen one, but when I was a child, one of my schoolmates brought one to class, and we'd all had fun trying to decipher the sequence needed to open it. No, it wasn't what I had been looking for, but in fact, might even be better, and I could hardly wait to give it to Shingen. "This is beautiful… and it's perfect."

I immediately paid, which was a good thing, as Yoshimoto tried to buy it out from under me. He threatened to outbid me, until I pointed out that he could commission one for himself, and as such, would be able to take part in the design. "I'm certain that Tokuro can execute anything you can envision."

"Thank you for your kind words," said the artist as he handed me the wrapped parcel.

My suggestion was successful, and I left Yoshimoto and Tokuro to hammer out the details of the commission. Perhaps I should have felt guilty at so easily escaping my so-called bodyguard, but Sasuke, who had been off on a mission for Kenshin for days, was due back, and I wanted to talk to him about time travel without Yoshimoto as an audience.

Once I had picked up the traditional order of pastry for Shingen, I laid in wait for Sasuke near the castle gates. Luckily for my fraying patience (seriously, why did Kenshin always send Sasuke on a mission right when I needed to talk to him?), it wasn't very long before I spotted my friend rounding the path from the stables.

"How was your latest errand?" I asked him. Errand was his universal catch-all for whatever mission Kenshin sent him on.

"Apparently less eventful than it was here." He gestured to the fading bruise under my eye. "I'm half convinced Kenshin sent me on a snipe hunt to punish me for planning to leave." He glanced at the few packages I was carrying. "Pastry run?"

"Among other things. So, I take it you gave notice to Kenshin…and it didn't go well?" I couldn't imagine that Kenshin would be happy to lose Sasuke. Though he wasn't as possessive of Sasuke as he was with Mai, I knew Kenshin would be upset to see Sasuke go.

"I phrased it as a leave of absence – but, no. It did not go well. He stabbed me here…. And here… and here." He pointed to his chest… his arm… his thigh. "And here… five times… as I tried to escape." He half turned and patted his own butt. "And then…"

"Hulk smash?"

Sasuke gave me one of his half-smiles. "It's nice to know I'm not the only one who recasts everyone here into the Marvel Universe, Hawkeye."

"Back at ya, Spidey." After nearly seven years of ruthlessly eliminating modern idioms from my vocabulary (at Aki's, any use of what Fume called my 'peasant dialect' had earned me extra floor scrubbing duties), it was nice to finally have a kindred spirit around. "So, um, I was thinking… and, maybe this is a completely radical idea… but would it be possible for us to take Shingen through the wormhole to get treatment for his illness?"

Originally, I had thought Sasuke could take Shingen with him, but over the week, I'd refined my plan. Shingen might be more easily convinced if I were to make the trip as well, and I'd realized there was a way I could use the records of the future to help locate Toshiie.

"Us?" He stopped walking and gave me a long look. "Yes, it's possible … you would put your search for your brother on hold to do this?"

It was less that I would put the search on hold – instead I would be switching tactics. Shingen had been teaching me that sometimes a second or third plan was better than the first. His lecture style involved posing a situation and requesting at least four potential strategies – and then pointing out everything that could go wrong with those strategies. "It's been almost seven years. At this point, I'm wondering if going forward in time would allow me to research shipping records that would make it easier to focus my search. I would start with the ports closest to the Togakushi shrine to figure out what ships were docked around that time, where they went after that and where they could be in 1582 and 1583."

"Huh. That isn't a bad plan. But... there's still another issue. I'm not certain that you'd be able to…" He began drawing something invisible in the air and talking about multiverses, Hilbert space, and infinite dimensions.

I waved my hand in front of his face. "Sasuke, I'm from the future, but you lost me once you started spouting equations at me." He didn't move. "Shoot, I didn't just accidentally pretend erase anything important, did I?"

"No, it's fine." He shook his head. "Well, it's all theoretical until Thor agrees to make the trip anyway. Do you mind me tagging along back to his room? Unless, you two didn't have any *ahem* plans?"

"My only plans are to figure out how to prevent him from working too hard." It would be nice if we could *ahem* but so far, our nighttime activities had been limited to actual sleep. Well, Shingen slept, crashing into slumber easily and deeply. I was as insomniac as ever, waking up multiple times in the night, although at least having Shingen to snuggle up against made being awake a less anxious state.

As I had feared, Shingen was still sitting in front of his desk, with his reports and messages organized into neat piles. He looked up and smiled as I slid the door open. "I come bearing gifts, a ninja, and," I gestured to Yuki, who we had run into en route. "This guy."

"Always happy to see, as you phrased it, 'this guy.'" As Yuki respectfully bowed to his lord, Shingen reached over and messed up his hair. "And Sasuke, it's gratifying to see you're in one piece. The last time I saw you, you were running past my door, with Kenshin hot on your heels."

With another wince, Sasuke rubbed his backside again.

"Come here, Devil. I need sustenance." He gave me a quick kiss, then grabbed the pastry basket and immediately rummaged inside.

"I hope this isn't your first break." He didn't look as overtired as he had on the first day he'd returned to work, but there were still deep circles under his eyes.

"And you'd better be eating… real food, not just sweets," Yuki added as he set a kettle of water heating for tea.

"He did eat his breakfast, I made sure of it." Hopefully Yuki wouldn't ask for details, as my methods were unorthodox and rated M.

Shingen waved at us. "I'm sitting right here, is it necessary to discuss my meal habits in third person?" Yuki and I exchanged a shrug. Over the week, we'd become fellow soldiers in the war to get Shingen healthy. With a sigh, Shingen said, "I repeat. You two are a terrible influence on each other."

Without prompting, Sasuke inserted himself in between us, as if to prevent further influence. The action was spoiled when he said, "They're not wrong."

These guys. My brothers from another mother.

Once the tea was ready, and the sweets were distributed to all who wanted them, we all made ourselves comfortable. As soon as I was within reach, Shingen wrapped his arm around me. "Why do I have the feeling this isn't merely a social visit?" He took the messages I'd brought and stuck them into a pile. I noticed that he had one message segregated from the others – he generally did that when it pertained to something urgent.

I looked at Sasuke. Sasuke looked at me. Neither of us wanted to start. Shingen looked at both of us, then gestured to me. "Out with it."

"Ok. So Sasuke said the wormhole to the future is going to o-open soon." I eyed Sasuke with a 'go on' look.

Shingen's arm tightened around me. "Is this a prelude to an announcement that you've decided to go back after all?"

He hadn't bothered to hide the dismay in his voice, so I hurried on. "Oh. No. Or, sort of maybe? If you will come with us?"

Yuki choked on his tea. "What?!" Sasuke and I hadn't had a chance to tell him our plan.

While Sasuke helped a sputtering Yukimura clear his windpipe of hot tea, I turned to Shingen, and put a hand on his chest. "We think it's possible that the doctors of our time can cure you."

He was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, he sounded resigned. "Is that a guarantee? Or simply a chance? I've consulted many healers over the years and been subjected to more than my share of medicines – some of which made me sicker than the illness itself."

"I don't know. I'm not a doctor." Sasuke pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "But it is true that many diseases from this time are curable in modern Japan."

"But not every one," Shingen said, having picked up on the subtext.

"No." If he had lung cancer, then there wouldn't be a cure. But I wasn't going to dwell on the possibility of failure. I took hold of his hands. "But it's a better chance than you would have if you stayed here."

"I don't get this whole time travel thing, but if Sasuke is an example of the kind of people who live in modern Japan, then their doctors probably can do all kinds of miracle type shit. You should do it." Then belated Yuki bowed again, and added a "My lord," for emphasis.

Shingen spoke slowly, as if he had accepted the initial premise and had moved on to determining the execution of the plan. Good. "So the three of us would travel to the future, I would see your era's healers, then at some point, we'd return here?"

"Yes," I said, at the same time that Sasuke said, "No."

"Wait, what?" I whipped my head around to look at Sasuke.

He cleared his throat. "Well, that would be the ideal scenario… I hope that is what would happen – but… there are other scenarios with a nonzero chance of probability. Allow me to demonstrate." He stood up and pulled all manner of ninja tools out of his clothing, to the extent that I wondered if he was secreting a mini-wormhole in his kimono, until he found several cords. He indicated the lantern on Shingen's desk. "May I borrow?"

Shingen made a go-ahead gesture. Sasuke put the lantern in the middle of the floor. "This is where, or rather, when we are. It's a fixed point in time and space." He tied a cord to the base of the lantern. "Katsu, can you hold this here?" He indicated a spot about two thirds of the way along the cord.

I got up and held the cord. This was Bill Nye realness in action.

"Seven years ago, Katsu and her brother travelled here through a wormhole at the Togakushi shrine, ending up here." Sasuke pointed to the lantern, then walked along the path of the cord, past me, and picked up the cord at the end. Now he and I and the lantern were lined up along a straight path.

"Then seven years after that, Mai and I travelled through a wormhole at Honno-ji. The problem is, I don't know for certain if I came from here," he gestured to where he was standing. "Or," He let go of the cord, returned to the center point, and tied another cord to the lantern. He walked that out to the other side of the room. "If we came from here… um, Yuki can you pretend to be me?"

Yuki threw something invisible on the floor. When none of us reacted, he said, "ground spikes."

"That's not how you throw them." Sasuke sighed. "Its all in the wrist-"

"Boys!" Shingen tapped his fingers on his desk.

Yuki grabbed the end of the other cord. His cord and my cord had created about a thirty-degree angle from the lantern.

Next, Sasuke tied a third cord to the lantern and walked it to Shingen. "This is a random future. In one multiverse theory, there would be an infinite number of these, because every decision can create a split in the timeline. That's why it's theoretically possible that Kastuko came from that line, while I came from the one Yuki is holding."

He returned to stand by the lantern. "All timelines can lead back to this point, because any current moment in time exists before a split. But once we all arrived here, we could even have created more splits." He gestured to the cord Shingen held.

"Now, say the three of us tried to go from here to the future. Which future, though?" He pointed at each cord in turn. "Shingen, because you are from this fixed point, you ought to be able to travel any of these potential futures. But say, you and I and Katsuko began our journey at Honno-ji. You and I would probably end up there – the place where I came from." He nodded to where Yuki was standing. "But what if there is already a Katsuko living in that timeline? I'm honestly not sure what would happen. Maybe it wouldn't matter and for a short while there would be two Katsukos living in that timeline. But it's also possible that in order to avoid a temporal paradox-"

"Could you at least try to use words the rest of us will understand?" That was Yuki.

Sasuke ignored him. "Katsuko might be sent back to her original timeline." He waved at where I was standing. "Or the wormhole would prevent her from leaving here at all… or she could end up someplace else." He gestured to Shingen's cord. "Or, she might simply cease to exist."

Shingen let go of the cord he was holding. "No. It's too much of a risk."

I looked at where I was standing – at the metaphorical version of Togakushi in my timeline, then over at Sasuke. "And if the three of us tried to go through at Togakushi, if and when it will appear… you'd be facing the same risks?"

Sasuke nodded.

"Well, then the solution is for me to stay here, and you and Shingen to go." Sasuke had the most experience with time travel, and from what little I'd gleaned about his life in modern Japan, a fair amount of financial resources. While I didn't want to separate from Shingen, I trusted Sasuke's risk estimates.

"That was my interpretation as well," Sasuke said.

Shingen picked up the cord and walked it back to Sasuke. Then he followed my cord from the lantern to where I stood. "Or, we wait for the Togakushi, er wormhole, then Katsuko and I will travel to her future."

Did Shingen have that luxury? Though he was recovering from the acute illness, the underlying disease was still there.

"Wait? How long?" Yuki's words echoed my thoughts. Shingen might not have that much time left.

"If my latest celestial observations are correct, three, maybe four months… I can't be certain, because I'm less familiar with that wormhole." Sasuke shrugged one shoulder.

"That puts it already in winter, in the mountains!" Yuki handed his cord to Shingen. "You know your illness is always worse when it gets cold. If a blizzard hit, would you even be able to get to the whole worm?"

"Wormhole," Sasuke murmured.

I'd never tried to talk Shingen into anything like this, and I wasn't sure how to start – but there was no way I was going to let him give up on his chance for treatment out of some misplaced worry for me. "I don't want you to risk waiting because I can't travel with you," I said. For that matter, after being gone from modern Japan for seven years, I didn't know how I would arrange for him to get treatment. Heck, I didn't even have bus fare to get from the shrine to Nagano, let alone a way to get the additional four hundred kilometers to Kyoto. I imagined that Sasuke, with his University affiliation, probably had better access to treatment.

"I have plans for the next four months. For starters, you and I are going to Ikuno." Shingen picked up the report he had set aside and handed it to me. "Read this."

Ikuno? Where was that? I tried to remember if I had ever been anywhere near it -it was in the south right? But… just read the report… I scanned it until the name Toshiie jumped out at me. It took a moment before the implications sunk in. He found my brother. Toshiie was alive and rather than being a prisoner or a reluctant sailor on a ship somewhere, he was living in the middle of the country. I stared up at Shingen. "You found him! How?"

"You told me he was interested in medicine, so it occurred to me that if he had managed to escape the ship, he might have continued his medical studies and moved inland. Yoshimoto made several copies of that portrait, and I put my mitsumono on the lookout. He's alive." He put his hands on my shoulders, then kissed my forehead. "We can start our journey there within the week. I will see you reunited with your brother."

When I had told Shingen that Toshiie wanted to be a doctor, it had been before Iekane had enacted his scheme. Shingen had found him for "Katsu." I was floored by his kindness to a person who basically had only been his mailman. He might be the kindest person I knew. He smiled down at me - something inside me cracked and released a swirl of emotions… gratitude… affection… fear… happiness. It was a tidal wave carrying the realization that… I … loved him. I probably had loved him for weeks, but I'd purposefully avoided examining my feelings too closely. At the last moment, I bit off the words before I said it out loud. Not now. Not in front of an audience. Not … before I was sure that he would even welcome the words.

Overwhelmed, I buried my face in his chest, knowing that he would attribute my speechlessness to gratitude.

He ran his fingers through my hair. "I don't want you to – at best – lose your chance at reuniting with your brother because of me, or, at worst, disappear completely."

"I… I…" I don't want you to die. I stepped out of his arms. "Now that I know where Toshiie is, I can wait. I don't want you to lose what potentially could be your only chance at a cure because of me."

"I think this is what the Americans call a Mexican stand-off," Sasuke commented. When the only reaction was Yukimura's inevitable eyeroll, he added, "Come on, Yuki, let's let them discuss it."

"Ok," Yuki said. "But if I get a vote, I vote you go back with Sasuke. Katsuko isn't a normal girl. She can take care of herself for a couple of months."

"Thank you, Yuki." I was getting more used to his non-compliment compliments.

He looked like he wanted to say more, but Sasuke yanked him out of the room.

"I can-" was as far as I got before Shingen put his hand over my mouth.

"I know you can – Katsuko, clearly we're not going to come to an agreement on this right now." He glanced at the other parcels I had brought with me. "We can discuss this later. Will you make more tea?"

He was doing that distraction thing again, but the note of finality in his voice told me that it was useless to argue at that moment. I would have to plan out how to convince him I was right.